My first job in high school was working in a sheet metal shop making metal boxes, and I’ve held a deep respect for the practicality of sheet metal design ever since. So, how can we create designs that can be assembled more intuitively? Two key principles in any design are that parts should be self-locating and self-fixturing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t borrow some wisdom from childhood and create designs that naturally self-locate-or designs that fit together smoothly enough to self-fixture during more permanent assembly, such as glueing and welding. Of course, in real-life product assembly, designs must be more complex. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that intuitive style of design could continue into adulthood? Even when my parents encouraged my interest in engineering with more complex Fischer Technics, nothing replaced the joy of quickly snapping pieces together in increasingly complex shapes. When I was a kid, nothing was more valuable to me than my big blue bucket of the multi-colored bricks.
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